Then I Say , “OK, Let’s Fight”

On a Supreme Court remade by a 6-3 conservative supermajority, Sotomayor has long been one of its fiercest voices of dissent: the justice who refuses to let an injustice pass in silence, who writes for the people she believes the law is abandoning, and who puts her objection on the record even when she knows the vote is already lost.

Just this week, when the majority moved to bar many victims of human rights abuses abroad from ever seeking justice in American courts under a law that had stood since 1789. She warned that the decision “slams the door in the faces of victims of horrific mistreatment,” and called it “yet another low point in this Court’s esteem for its precedents.” She dissents, again and again, not for the Court as it is, but for the fairer one she is determined will someday exist.

She came by that resolve the hard way. Sonia Sotomayor was born in the Bronx in 1954, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. She was seven when she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and learned to give herself daily insulin injections, and nine when her father died — leaving her mother, a nurse, to raise two children alone on six-day work weeks in a public housing project. By the age of ten, watching the television lawyer Perry Mason, Sonia had already decided she would become an attorney. “That’s no jest,” she later said of how certain she was, that young.

She kept that promise to herself against long odds. At Princeton, where she arrived feeling like “a visitor landing in an alien country,” she graduated summa cum laude and won the university’s highest undergraduate honor. Yale Law School followed, then years as a hard-charging Manhattan prosecutor. A Republican president, George H.W. Bush, made her a federal trial judge; a Democrat, Bill Clinton, raised her to the federal appeals court. And in 2009, Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court, where she became the first Latina — and only the third woman — ever to serve.

She has never claimed to have done it alone, or forgotten how close she came to being passed over. She has credited affirmative action with bringing students like her to “the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run” — and she has never stopped insisting that the ladder she climbed not be pulled up behind her.

On this Court, the losses come far more often than the wins, and Sotomayor feels each one. Asked how she keeps going, she has given the answer printed on the image we share today. There are days she gets discouraged, she admitted — days she has stopped to ask whether it is worth it at all. And then, every time, she makes the same choice: “OK, let’s fight.”

That is what we honor on her 72nd birthday — a justice who has spent her life insisting that the promise carved above the Supreme Court’s entrance, equal justice under law, must hold for every worker, immigrant, defendant, and child, and not for the powerful alone. Happy birthday, Justice Sotomayor — and here’s to many more years of “OK, let’s fight.”

Sonia Sotomayor has told her life story in two books for children: “Turning Pages: My Life Story” for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/turning-pages) and “The Beloved World of Sotomayor” for ages 10 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-beloved-world-of-sonia…)

She is also the author of an empowering children’s book about disability that celebrates the different abilities that make each of us unique, “Just Ask” for ages 4 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/just-ask

To introduce children to this trailblazing Supreme Court Justice, we also recommend the picture book “I Am Sonia Sotomayor” for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/i-am-sonia-sotomayor), the chapter book “She Persisted: Sonia Sotomayor” for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-sonia-sotomayor), and the illustrated biography “Who is Sonia Sotomayor?” for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/who-is-sonia-sotomayor)

For adult readers interested in learning more about this trailblazer, check out Sotomayor’s fascinating memoir, “My Beloved World,” at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780345804839(Bookshop) and http://amzn.to/1phJ1IW(Amazon)